Happiness in Slavery

Music video

The music video for "Happiness in Slavery" was directed by Jon Reiss and inspired by the 1899 novel The Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau. It features performance artist Bob Flanagan entering a large room, placing a flower and a candle on an altar. He removes his clothing, washes himself, and lies down on a machine that straps him in. Long robotic claws arise from the machine and tear apart his skin and impale his hands, to which he reacts with pleasure.

Drills drill into his skin in various places, letting his blood drip onto the floor below, where a garden appears to be fertilized by human blood. Later, large grinders emerge from the machine, causing extreme injury. As Flanagan screams in a mixture of pleasure and pain, the machine disembowels him, ultimately killing him, then engulfs his body in a metal cask and minces it into fertilizer for the garden. At the end, Trent Reznor, who had been singing the lyrics inside a cell at the beginning of the video, enters the room and begins to perform the same ritual, the video fading to black as he lights a candle.

The video was almost universally banned once released, but was later included on the Closure video album and in the Broken film. It was featured on Too Much 4 Much, MuchMusic's showcase of videos banned from their regular programming. Reznor commented that the video was not created for shock value, but because "these were the most appropriate visuals for the song." It had to do with his artistic freedom at the time after his fallout with TVT Records.